Saturday, 10 January 2009

Darwin's Nightmare


Winner of an Oscar for Best Documentary, DARWIN'S NIGHTMARE is a tale about people, the North/South divide, globalization, and about fish.

Some time in the 1960s, in the heart of Africa, a new animal was introduced into Lake Victoria as a little scientific experiment. The Nile Perch, a voracious predator, extinguished almost the entire stock of the native fish species. However, this new gigantic fish multiplied incredibly fast, and its white fillets are today exported all around the world. Huge hulking ex-Soviet cargo planes come daily to collect the latest catch in exchange for their southbound cargo: Kalashnikovs and ammunitions for the uncounted wars in the dark center of the African continent.


This booming multinational industry of fish and weapons has created an ungodly globalized alliance on the shores of the world’s biggest tropical lake: an army of local fishermen, World Bank agents, homeless children, African ministers, EU-commissioners, Tanzanian prostitutes and Russian pilots. DARWIN'S NIGHTMARE brings us in close for an intimate and at times uncomfortable look at this world, and in doing so this film deftly unpacks the puzzle of globalization in a visually stunning and raw portrait of life on this planet.




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